Iran has had numerous political defectors warning "The West" about the clerical leaders of the Islamic Republic of Iran developing nuclear weapons for over twenty years and as recently as November of 2004.  Colin Powell, during his last official trip as the U.S. Secretary of State, told reporters in Chile that the intelligence community had recently been given a gift -- a walk-in Iranian defector carrying with him about a thousand pages of documents detailing the technological efforts of the Iranians to marry nuclear warheads with the missile already in Iranian inventory.

It would seem to me that those kind of technological efforts are one of the last steps one does to become a nuclear power.  In other words, there really should be no doubt that Iran has already developed nuclear warheads.  The fact that the Mullahs with Nukes are not driving them around Tehran in a proud Soviet-style military parade for the western intelligence agencies to photograph shouldn't be of any comfort to anyone.  One of the many problems the Bush administration has created for itself -- and by extension, all of us -- by their pre-emptive and prolonged romp around Iraq is that now if Condoleeza Rice stands in front of the United Nations Security Council with polaroid pictures of Iranian nuclear weapons, there are few people in the world that would believe her since the Bush administration lied, and lied again, concerning Iraq.

Why didn't we see this coming?  Why do they hate us?

We have and we have not.  They do and they don't.  One of the many primary failures in the administrations of the last three U.S. presidents (Bush-Clinton-Bush) is simply not taking this Mullahs with Nukes problem seriously enough, and a mistaken presumption concerning the relationships between the enemies of the United States.  Old school, Cold War warriors in the CIA evaluated everything about most of the countries in the Middle East as simply a logistical problem whose only strategic considerations were boiled down to the question of, "Can we fuel our war machine there?"  I can personally affirm, from my own experience, that that was the general mindset of the intelligence and defense crowd in the 1980's, even from the limited, personal keyhole through which I had access to know about the bigger picture of the world at that time.

First, let's not forget that Iran officially declared war with the U.S. way back during the 444 days of the U.S. embassy hostage crisis more than 25 years ago.  Have the Iranian clerics somehow changed their minds about their desires to kill Americans since that time?  No, not at all.  As a matter of fact, I just watched a very tedious speech by the leader of Iran in front of an audience of Iranian military that was broadcast on C-Span this year which concluded with everyone in the room chanting, "Death to Israel, Death to the Zionists, Death to America!"  Second, let's not forget that the U.S. backed Saddam Hussein's side of the regionally devastating Iran-Iraq war.  The Iranian Mullahs with Nukes have ample historical and current points to justify their reasons for wanting to strike a devastating blow to the United States, or any of its closest allies.

The enemy of my enemy is my friend

Despite the obviousness of this old Arab proverb, the head of the middle-eastern bureau at the CIA operated under the assumption that Sunni Wahabbi terrorists would never covort with the Shia Iranian Mullahs with Nukes.  A very under-reported fact that was brought out during the extensive work of the 911 Commission (perhaps because it is in the classified portions of that report) is that nearly half of the Saudi terrorists perpetrating their 911 terror were helped and fascilitated by Iranian intelligence agents at many earlier points along their way to 911.

The Iranian - Al Qaeda intelligence reports were literally discovered by the 911 Commission staffers a week before their report was due to be published.  They found a CIA summary report at the bottom of document box that caused them to request 75 more intelligence reports at the eleventh hour detailing Iranian and Al Qaeda collaboration.  As a matter of undisputed fact: an Iranian defector told a CIA section chief at the U.S. embassy in Azerbaijian that "Arab fighters" (before they were tagged with the Al Qaeda name) were training to hijack commercial airplanes in a facility, north of Tehran, in the Spring of 2001.

Do you remember the last three years of "unspecified" threats that made the Secretary of Homeland Security raise the stupid color code alert system based upon terrorist chatter?  Guess what?  The very same man in Azerbaijian that warned of a major hijacking operation planned for the U.S. also told our man from the CIA exactly what date it was to occur, very specifically, September 11th.  He was ignored and discredited by the CIA.  However, if it is any consolation to the relatives of the thousands of 911 victims, this top-level bureaucrat was just fired by Porter Goss.

The nightmare scenario

The Pentagon has already war-gamed the nightmare scenario that the Pakistani nuclear guru A.Q. Khan has given the Iranian clerics his rolodex of black market nuclear technology suppliers from France to North Korea.  Iran has nukes, but since Iran doesn't want a traditional confrontation with the U.S. in the Persian Gulf, they prefer to fascilitate plausibly deniable actions against its enemies. Porter Goss had an accidental slip of the tongue this year when he exclaimed that the CIA knew where Osama Bin Laden was located but he was unfortunately being protected by a sovereign state.

That probably doesn't mean Afghanistan.  Karzai has been openly battling Al Qaeda for several years.  It probably doesn't mean Pakistan either, unless Bin Laden is tucked away in the Kasmir region, where Musharev has little control.  I think after seven assassination attmepts on Musharev, he's not Osama's buddy, anyway.  The fact that no one seems to want to talk publicly about Iran is telling.

When Iran publicly admitted their nuclear capabilities after the U.S. showed up in Iraq, it was an obvious warning to anyone paying attention to this tidbit in the news.  The Bush administration isn't making Iran a focus to the American people simply because there are not any easy cookie cutter Karl Rove outcomes to this problem.

The one nightmare scenario that worries most people is the one where Iran gives an Al Qaeda cell one little nuclear weapon, an anonymous ocean vessel, and a scud missile launcher for it.  A small team could literally sail up next to Cuba, and toss a scud missile-propelled nuke at Washingtion, D.C., or any major city on the eastern seabord.  Within 3-5 minutes, a quarter million people would likely be vaporized and our military would be left scratching their collective heads as to whom to retaliate against since there is no specific country of origin for the nuclear attack.

The Dark Ages

More and more though, I am seeing lawmakers on C-Span discuss in committee and give speeches on the floor of their legislative bodies concerning a topic about which any casual fan of Sci-Fi already knows.  Despite the obvious Hiroshima-style aftermath of a quarter-million cooked Americans in some city, a nuclear blast at around 100 miles above a city would produce an Electro-Magnetic Pulse (EMP).  It is thought that the after effects of an EMP blast might actually cause enough chaos and mayhem to kill many more hundreds of thousands of people.

An EMP would shut down all electrical devices that were not hardened against that threat over the entire region of the country.  In other words, if D.C. got nuked, the EMP from that nuke could shut down everything containing any electronics from Miami, FL to Bangor, ME, depending upon the size of the nuke and its detonation altitude.

What does that mean?  That means that we all get to go back to Dark Ages.  Most major U.S. cities only have about three days worth of food unless interstate trucking can resupply a city's hundreds of grocery stores.  Millions of people without water, or food, or even transportation to leave the city could turn New York City and many other places into a gruesome place to be.  It also means that whatever city on the eastern seaboard that gets hit by the actual nuclear blast will burn until fire trucks from somewhere like Kansas arrive, since all vehicles within the EMP radius will be rendered useless.  People who get paid to imagine the worst don't call this the "nightmare scenario" for lack of a better name.

What can be done?

Taking the problem to the United Nations probably will not be very helpful in the short term.  The other countries on the U.N. Securitiy Council will likely blow the United States off.  First, because of the previously mentioned lies about Iraq that will kill our credibility about any future wolf cry, even if it is the truth.  Bush squandered our international credibility there.  But, second, the European Union has had a good grasp of the Iranian nuclear problem for ten years.  And frankly, they and the other permanent members of the U.N. Security Council feel safe that Iran and Al Qaeda are fairly focussed on the U.S., or Israel, for anything so spectacular as a nuclear attack.

Leaders of a number of countries wouldn't care about this threat because the Mullahs with Nukes have clearly stated that the U.S., and Israel, and those shadowy Zionists are Iran's enemies, not anyone specifically in the European Union.  Their only real concern would be the possible shutdown of many world markets from the knee-jerk U.S. retaliatory response of nuking Iran.  But, when the shit does hit the fan, it will likely be in New York City or even Los Angeles that suffers from a nuclear strike.  The modern technologically entrenched cities in the U.S. are more vulnerable to the lifestyle change coming from an EMP blast than the rural, agricultural areas on the planet that might not even have an electrical grid.

You'd think that Israel might get nuked first, but that may not happen because of the unblinking scrutiny of everyone's satellites and intelligence services focussing on that region.  Yet, some group of guys can sail a vessel from Sudan almost up to the port of Miami fairly little interference in international waters.

The long term solution must be embarked upon.  The U.S. government must fund and support the many Iranians wishing to reform their current government of Iran.  It is a hopeful sign that the last election in Iran was boycotted massively by many Iranians.  If a regime change by Iranians is not put forward, the only other option for stability and peace will be a military one.  Iran is a serious national security problem for the U.S. for which the Bush administration does not have many good answers so far.

Further reading:

Countdown to Crisis : The Coming Nuclear Showdown with Iran
by Kenneth R. Timmerman

Countdown to Terror: The Top-Secret Information that Could Prevent the Next Terrorist Attack on America... and How the CIA has Ignored it
by Curt Weldon

[Headphones] :: Bush and Brando Debate - JfZ

Despite the fact that I have consistently identified myself as a Libertarian for more than a decade, I get maligned and personally attacked by the far right-wing conservative nutbags blogging in my country more than I am hassled by any communist nanny goverment liberals.  Whether you are a tree-hugging socialist or a fascist fear-mongering christian mullah, I say, "get thee behind me."

That's bible-talk for fuck off.

But, I really feel I have to tell both poles of the same oppression, by any another name, that you can suck my big fat dick.  Christian conservative fascist nutbags can spit my spunk out and know that Jesus still loves them despite their indescretions.  Nanny government communist liberals can avoid my salty goo by offering free condoms and dental dams.

Now that I might have shocked you enough to pay attention, I have to re-iterate how much I am disappointed with the conservativism of the far-right and the liberalism of the far-left in the United States.  Simply put, you both suck.

And further, the U.S. constitution is quite clear in regards to modern day issues, especially privacy and the protection against unwarranted search and seizure.  Whether it is security versus liberty, or privacy versus safety, or big brother versus freedom -- not only do both political sides fail miserably -- but also, they are so corrupt in their political thinking that these bi-polar idealogues are continually infecting the common sense middle ground of America and the world.

Whether is it random searches in public for mass transit passengers or the unbelievable proposal that police should be able to pull you over for smoking cigarettes in your own car, in NJ -- these politicians and legislators need to be embarrassingly flogged in public, or called to task in the media, or sent back to constitutional grade school and then put away in lawmaker retirement homes.

Let me just share a fact.  More people die in the United States (on average) every year by being struck by lightning (67) from God himself than died in the four seperate terrorist bombings upon the London tube and bus mass transit systems on July 7th.  I'm not trying to minimize any individual person's grief and loss who may have suffered as much from this despicable act of terrorism, but I am trying to point out the apparent over-reaction by local politicians an ocean away who seem to have too much time on their hands and want to appear to be doing something, anything, about this latest incident.

What part of unwarranted or unreasonable search and seizure do the people in charge of the mass transit system in the U.S. not understand?  This is not East Berlin under the KGB.  The scariest thing to me is the normalization of the two ends of totalitarianism meeting together to excuse away the public citizen's rights based upon the fear of the fracking Great Pumpkin in a supposedly free society.

How is not fascist that you search random people in public?  Don't give me any excuses.  The generational Bush-Saud bed buddy-induced love fest and lack of HUMINT about Wahabbi terrorists are allowing those extremist world views to win the day by shutting down the (supposedly evil) freedoms of the western world and supplanting the daily activities of average people in previously free societies with surveillance cameras and ineffectual random searches.  Or worse, authorizing pseudo military detainments in extra-jurisdictional locations of the seized and detained -- in which they may linger for years without any regard to international or U.S. law  -- simply because they were snatched up during the grayest timeframe of international strife, law, government and civilized behavior, by a pre-emptively aggressive, sheltered and self-assured, self-annoited, and apparently, self-ordained dictator and crusader of world democracy named George W. Bush and friends.

At home, however, the Democrusader whips up fear and patriotism, so liberals and conservatives alike can acknowledge the apparent need for surveillance, and caution, and prudence, and counter-intelligence, and domestic surveillance, and secret law enforcement dossiers of political opponents, and all manner of completely fascist bullshit.  All these things are needed when everyone is running scared of their own shadow, political destiny, and getting caught red-handed as a politically weak and criminal coward.

I can only hope the next delusional meglomaniac we elect as president of the United States is more in touch with the average family struggling to survive in the so-called richest country on the planet.  Despite all the bootstrap talk of the self-righteous, compassionate conservative, right-wing, rich, nut bags who become our elected officials in federal government these days -- our jobs, technology, manufacturing base, currency and pensions have been off-shored and out-sourced by some sickly unpatriotic and nefarious sociopaths in power recently.  I'll let you name your own names; the list is surely long.

Here's a future song lyric I just made up for you, describing the stupidity of the state of affairs in the so-called civilized world.  Maybe I'll name it Terrorist Action Over Reaction, or just Over Kill:

I made a tupperware bomb.
Found a bus to put it on.
Although I died in the blast,
I will be laughing at last,
just like Orwell in his grave
and Bin Laden in his cave.

So, instead of actually promoting more funding for some of the intelligence agencies, so they don't have a two-year-long backlog of something as stupidly simple as language translation of suspected terrorist chatter, we have lawmakers like Hillary Clinton who focus on starting a commision to investigate whether or not some pale womanless hacker geek put out a pornographic software patch for the Grand Theft Auto video game.  These kind of politicians totally suck.  Well, I guess maybe Hillary doesn't actually suck, but Monica Lewinsky apparently does.  Perhaps that is how the Grand Theft Auto porn patch came to Hillary's attention in the first place.  I didn't even know Bill Clinton owned a playstation.  Go figure.


[Headphones] :: G is for Gihad - Soylent Gringo

Have you heard of the global weather phenomenom of the African dust storm?  I've only seen one dust storm in my life.  It happened while I was driving along the I-10 freeway near the Mexican border when I was working as consultant in El Paso, Texas.  Growing up in Detroit, in the Great Lake state of Michigan, there wasn't any likelihood of seeing a dust storm.  But, during the months of my contract, experiencing the landscape and lifestyle in the areas around El Paso, Texas, and Las Cruces, New Mexico, and Cuidad Juarez, Mexico was fairly unique for me, anyway.

After working for several weeks, I had finally began to be less distracted by the sights along my daily commute from the hospital back home to my hotel, but on this day I spotted an immense dark wall of clouds on the horizon.  At first, I thought it was simply a thunderstorm.  The entire day had been clear and sunny, so initially, I just became disappointed that the weather was going to be turning ugly, just at the time that I finally got off of work.

However, after stealing a few more quick looks at the approaching storm off to my side -- while also trying to drive safely on the freeway -- I noticed something wasn't quite right. Something was off, but since I had no prior experience or reference to the thing upon which I was furtively glancing, it took a little while to understand what I was actually seeing.

It was the color.  Those building storm clouds weren't gray, they were actually reddish brown.  And the perspective was off.  The front edge of the storm wasn't actually far off on the horizon, it was much closer and hanging low to the ground.  It seemed to be miles wide.

To me, it was an unusual sight of nature, but I imagine some of you who live in the southwest of the United States must see dust storms and dust devils (tornadoes) on a regular basis.  People living near the many deserts of the world must also see dust clouds frequently.  I've heard some news reports from Iraq about the sand storms that last way too long for anyone's tastes.

Now, I just heard on the radio that sometime early next week, I may be seeing my second dust storm.  I found that very, very odd -- since I live in Florida.

Apparently, the dust storm is so large as to be visible from satellite.  This cloud of dust is kicked up in north western Africa and actually travels across the Atlantic ocean on high altitude trade winds over the course of several days.  The dust cloud is about the size of the contiguous 48 states of the U.S.

[snark] I don't mean to seem ungrateful, but ... how is it fair that we send billions of governmental and privately-raised aid dollars to Africa and they send us back some dust?  That continent also seems to send some terrorists.  That continent allows hurricanes to spawn off its coast every year which destroy billions of dollars of property here in the south eastern United States, and the islands, and Mexico.  That's not fair at all.  This dust is just a further insult to our well-meaning intercontinental relations.

Just for that Africa, we're going to help you establish stable democracies, market economies, and free trade agreements with all of your countries on the continent.  That way, the next time you send us a hurricane, we'll send you the scourge of a totally pointless Starbucks or McDonalds franchise.  The next time you send us a dust storm, we'll build a tennis shoe factory or clothing sweat shop there.  Take that! [/snark]

Actually, it may all turn out much better at the end of the day.  Some people are forecasting that the combination of the latest hurricane (thank you very much) and the dust storm (thanks again) may create some unusually colorful sunrises and sunsets in Florida.  Murphy's Law: I hope it doesn't botch the space shuttle lift off, though.

[Headphones] :: Hurricane Jeanne is Gone - JfZ

As you should know by now, President Bush announced his first judicial nominee for the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) last night in a televised interuption to regularly scheduled programming.  Despite my unanswered emails of objection to the corporate offices of many broadcasting networks, Dubya's C-Span style press briefing was televised.  Sadly, reruns of "Buffy, the Vampire Slayer" were interupted, but luckily not for very long.  I won't need to study ten thousand posts on alt.soc.tv.buffy on usenet newsgroups in order to follow the storyline next week.  Priorities.

Dubya's nomination of John Roberts will hopefully satisfy his socially conservative core constituency.  The conservative nutbag slogans of "judicial tyranny" and "legislating from the bench" and "we just want an up or down vote" are so tedious to me, it makes my teeth hurt.  It's almost as troublesome to hear those phrases as it is hearing the Democrusader carefully articulate the word "i-dee-ahl-loe-gee" over and over and over again.

It's not as bad as when I hear him tell an audience of soldiers and marines that "he supports them and appreciates their sacrifice."  God bless America, yadda yadda.  Puppetry and lies.  Just shut up.  Sometimes, when I hear Dubya's voice on TV, I wish he would just go ride his bicycle while eating a pretzel, if you know what I mean.

But, I am more hopeful that everyone gets pissed off.  That way, hated Democrats in the Senate -- like Clinton, Kennedy, and Kerry -- will make useless accusations and the confirmation hearing will be turned into a political nightmare theater of witnesses testifying about pubic hairs on beverage cans, as happened with Justice Thomas and witness Anita Hill.

Unfortunately, John Roberts looks like a stereotypical stand-up guy from the 1950's.  He looks like he has been been recruited straight out of a movie studio's central casting of some black and white situational comedy (sitcom).  Who is going to complain about justice Dick Van Dyke?

Nonetheless, I know that opposition groups like People for the American Way and MoveOn.Org will find some way to bitch about this supreme court nomination from Dubya.  I realize that they capitalize on the moment for fund raising, but I actually don't care that they do that.  If I cared about people exploiting the moment, I'd first be outraged about the far right-wing nutbags exploiting Terri Shiavo for political purposes, wouldn't I?

Oh, yeah.  I was a bit pestered at Tom Delay about the Shiavo thang.  What a tool.  Well, like I said, hopefully, John Roberts will be confirmed in the Senate without the indignation of pubic hair testimony, or questions about his preference for having his wife wear a creepy pink suit to the White House, or having a son acting up in front of the press in some sick, light blue, Little Lord Fauntleroy outfit.  That's just toddler fashion abuse.

Despite John Robert's manly dimpled chin, last night he dressed his family up in pastel colored business suits and they all looked like the pastel houses featured in the bucolic neighborhood from the Tim Burton movie "Edward Scissorhands."  It was like a 1970's high school prom nightmare with cheap pastel-colored suits snatched up at the last minute from the Sears and Roebucks mens wear department.  That level of Stepford creepiness should be illegal.

But, perhaps Dudley Do-Right doesn't care about fashion -- except whether or not he will be wearing the robe of a Supreme Court judge.  Whatever.  Moose and Squirrel, Moose and Squirrel, Moose and Squirrel.

Do me a favor.  Don't get too distracted and caught up in the minutia that is likely to be dragged out concerning John Roberts.  He'll probably become a decent justice, anyway.  Don't be distracted by another Bush bag of tricks.  Rather, turn the focus of the media back onto Karl Rove, the Downing Street Memo, and getting it right in Iraq so everyone's sons and daughters serving in the military in that sand trap of a country can return home safely and soon.

[Headphones] :: Birthday-partyparty mix (lo-fi stream) - RX

I think there are very few people in the Bush administration more hated by Democrats and progressives and even more blindly defended by Republicans than Karl Rove.  In the heirarchy of Bushworld, Rove commands staunch GOP loyalty, second only to the Democrusader himself.  If Bush, Cheney and Rove were aboard a doomed sailing vessel going down in the deep blue sea (a wet dream for some millions of people) -- and there were only two life preservers available -- I feel the majority of GOP pundits would vote to hit Cheney over the head like a baby seal, if he didn't give Karl Rove his life preserver.

Now, before you go calling the Secret Service or the even more formidable group of jack-booted thugs at PETA about my "baby seal" remark -- please realize that it's just an illustrative turn of phrase.  I want to state unequivocally that I don't support any violent acts upon our elected officials, or those fuzzy, cuddly-looking and doe-eyed baby seals.  I don't support Dick Cheney wearing fur.  He's a fat man.  Imagine, how many extra baby seals would have to die to make him a fur coat?

Now, let's get back to the other fat man in the sinking ship.  Karl Rove -- who I had just compared to Hermann Goring, founder of the Nazi Gestapo after his remarks last month in New York -- is loved by Republicans.  He is given the main credit for both successful presidential elections of his fuhrer, George W. Bush.

He is lovingly called, "The Architect," by his GOP devotees and he's likely earned this man-love by the Bush Family even more than Osama bin Laden himself for the successful architecture of the political career of the troubled, idiot son, Dubya.  The day after President Bush won re-election in 2004, he referred to Karl Rove as The Architect, and thanked him in his acceptance speech.  PBS' Frontline show has even explored this pasty-pale phat political phenom architect in-depth.

I personally don't forecast anything untoward will happen to Karl Rove in the near future, unless a liposuction procedure or stomach stapling operation goes horribly wrong.  Dubya-defenders and Rovians are spinning this latest controversy faster than the winds of hurricane Emily over the Cayman Islands, the jurisdiction in which Rove likely has many millions of dollars hidden in offshore bank accounts, anyway.

The pundit spin is immense.  Media Matters is a fun place to see that.  Republican crack whore, Ann Coulter, is playing her most entertaining peak game.  Blame the messenger.  She calls Ambassador Wilson, Clown Wilson on Fox and in her recent op-ed articles.

Man, I love watching this GOP boo-boo kitty on TV, sometimes.  It's like watching a NASCAR race and knowing the odds are very good that there will be an entertaining crash.  I watch her like that.  I know if I even remotely watch her televised interviews with enough tenacity, someday I will witness that one last interview in which Crack Head Coulter has an aneurism and slumps over the desk on camera.

Truly, this Karl Rove CIA leak scandal brings back some old memories.  I had just posted an unnoticed, but bizarre and snarky entry about the CIA itself called, "Spy Kids 3D - Game Over," when this situation first developed.  Go read that entry.  It might make you laugh in the tradition of you can't make this shit up (YCMTSU), or it might make you cower in paranoia and adjust your tin foil hat.

[Headphones] :: Who's the Nigga (lo-fi stream) - RX

I've seemed to have beaten the odds and avoided Joe Black for enough years now that I tend to have discussions with people about some of those big ticket issues of the mysteries of our human condition, like the entry, "On Life and Death."  Then again, just because I'm feeling longer in the tooth in the Cave Bear Clan lately may not be the reason I find myself thinking about some of these things.  If you were to ask some of my high school friends, they would likely interject the notion that I have always been an annoying philosophical stoner and drunk at parties.

I won't bore you with any childhood or teenage high school stories.  I'll touch on some background.  I was poorer and smarter than the general demographic make-up of my high school peers.  Perhaps because I was always enrolled in advanced placement classes and generally made top grades in those classes, people reacted to me in odd ways.

Obviously, I felt like I didn't fit in anywhere, and was generally polite, but shy.  Taking my academic schedule into consideration, combined with my shyness,  I was generally perceived by most people as aloof.  My friends, who represented all kinds of people, knew I certainly wasn't snobby, or aloof.  I was just an outsider with the general cliques to which people are drawn.

The odd thing to me now, looking back on it, was that I ended up being that unusual person in everyone's cliques.  Perhaps, I might have developed a certain appreciation for the ability to simply and quietly get along with anyone from my time living with a number of foster families.  Whatever the reason, I constantly felt like I was the outsider for everyone else's reindeer games.  The facts tell a different story, however.

I was a jock sometimes.  I played on the high school football team.  We won a state championship.  I was an egghead sometimes.  I was attending every advanced placement class my school offered.  I think I had calculus in tenth grade.  I got A's.  I graduated early.  I took a day off of my job as a driver for a tool and die shop in Detroit in order to participate in graduation ceremonies.

I was a stoner sometimes.  I have helped smoke up bales of weed. I started smoking cigarettes when I was about nine, but I was about twelve or thirteen when I first got stoned.  I was a slut sometimes.  I used to skip afternoon sessions of football weight training to be with my girlfriend before her father came home from work.  I was a thug sometimes.  I was party to minor and major acts of criminality as a teenager.  I was involved in acts of vandalism, breaking and entering, theft, larceny, international smuggling, underage drinking, assault, battery, etc.

I experimented with every drug available to me -- with only one caveat -- no needles.  I never sold drugs, although I have seen garbage bag-sized bales of weed and pillow-sized multi-kilos of cocaine.  Note: I grew up before crack rocks hit the streets.  Somehow, the buzz or the money of drug trafficking never took hold on me.

The reason I give my personal teenage confessional is because now I have a best friend whose teenage daughter is having problems.  She hasn't been tossed into jail yet, but she is a girl interupted, taking a time-out at a residential treatment facility.

Do I offer her empathy based upon my past or do I tell her to straightened-the-hell-up and fly right?  Or some combination of both things?

[Headphones] :: Boys and Girls (lo-fi stream) - RX

A stream of conscious.  What does that mean?  Free flowing thoughts pour forth.  Unknown ideas and related concepts become strung together in some fomat.  If one has a train of thought, a stream of conscious must fire through the neurological pathways in the brain like a speeding, twisting and turning roller coaster ride.  When the mind pouring forth these ideas is as large as every thought expressed on every web page on the planet, just casually browsing the web can turn into a flash flood of the digital planet.

Should a comatose and pregnant mother be kept alive artificially long enough in order to deliver the baby?  I say, yes.  And, it is being done in the case of Susan Torres.  Although this seems to be a highly unusual circumstance, I don't see any moral or ethical problems with it.  As a society, we commonly prolong the life of completely brain dead patients in the hospital in order to harvest organs for transplantation.  While that is more of a scheduling issue and usually doesn't prolong death by more than a day, other suffering and terminal patients wait on long lists for donor organs that save their pathetic and ailing lives.

Practically no one from any spectrum of political or religious thinking believes organ transplantation is unethical or immoral.  Even the typically unmovable and conservative Catholic Church has weighed in on the organ transplantion issue.  Decades ago, the Vatican deemed it a blessing of modern man's technology, and hence, ethical and moral to artificially prolong life because it subsequently preserves the life of another person who is surely condemned to die without the organ transplantation.

On the face of it though, it could seem a bit creepy, especially when viewed in a vaccuum of theoretical morality or ethics.  Stories and modern mythology of third world organ harvesting for transplantion is troublesome -- even if this urban legend about harvesting internal organs actually only happened once with one person in Beijing, China.

But, despite the fact that we are a planet of six billion souls, each person is indeed a new story of tragedy and joy.  Like the Terri Shiavo case, one can't easily make law covering any given personal situation, and politics is certainly not the best boxing ring in which to fight for one side of the argument or another.  When emotions or religious zealotry weigh in on the arguments, logic and scientific facts are usually tossed out with the bath water.

For the most part, science, medicine, law and theology have agreed to pin the question of life and death upon the presence (or lack thereof) of brain activity.  Brain dead is dead.  I think most of the GOP and Evangelical activism concerning Terri Shiavo did not argue this point.  Most of the argument was specifically whether or not Schiavo, herself, was actually in a persistent vegetative state.  The general argument of the vocal Evangelical activism surrounding Shiavo had more to do with their general disdain for the judicial branch of government and its rulings in the Shiavo case, and their fixaton on other pro-life/no-choice social engineering issues. 

While this may seem like an argument that splits hairs -- or actually splits cells -- it is fairly important, when religious beliefs bleed into the arenas of law and government.  The status of the soul is as old as Plato.  The almost romantic notion that life begins at conception is the root of the argument against harvesting stem cells for medical research.  Despite the cuddly grandstanding of the so-called Snowflake Children at the White House, an embryo doesn't have even a hint of a brain until it has developed for about two weeks.

Prior to two weeks maturation, the blissful clump of cells have no brain.  If a person is dead when their previously working brain is dead, why then are a clump of cells with no brain considered to be ethically or morally alive?

Some people will twist this debate by using the potentiality argument.  But like the Snowflake Children, it doesn't answer my specific and basic ethical question concerning the granting of the 'being alive' status, when a week-old embryo can't even be properly called brain dead because it does not even have a brain yet.

The potentiality argument is described by some ethicists as the Home Depot argument.  The stuff for sale inside the Home Depot has the potential to build ten houses, but clearly, it requires some additional effort to build just one house from the building materials.  Similarly, a clump of cells dividing in an invitro fertilization clinic could become a child with a woman willing to carry them around in her belly for the next nine months. Without this additional effort, there is absolutely no potential.

Additonally, there is no conflict between the idea of adopting spare fertilized eggs to become Snowflake Children and using some of them for developing a useful population of embryonic stem cell lines.  There are enough spares to go around for everyone.  The current prohibition based upon romantic religous beliefs only does one thing: it only hobbles the biomedical research capabilities in the U.S. as the work will simply proceed on pace in other countries.

In my humble opinion, it seems hypocritical to use a potentiality argument for Snowflake Children and then not use it concerning embryonic stem cell research by ignoring and dismissing the potentiality of that promising research.  What do you think?


[Headphones] :: Droplet - Takako Mini

I've been AWOL for the last few days here on Dark Skies.  While I didn't experience any direct hit from Hurricane Dennis this year, some of its outflow bands of tornadoes and thunderstorms were worrisome in central Florida.  Personally, I had no inconvenience or trauma from this hurricane, unlike last year's quadruple fun show, but I did get stuck waiting at the grocery store for a nasty feeder band from Dennis to finish its horizontal rains, so I could walk home on Saturday.  I'd gone to the Winn Dixie to buy food just in case the power went out like last year, so at least I could make some sandwiches.

Since I've been having ISP issues, I had post-dated the "blogs" entry when I was not digitally deprived.  So, I haven't really been online since before the London terrorist bombings.  Terrorists suck.  Today, I heard Tom Friedman opine on the "Imus in the morning" show that he is weary of even contemplating "why they hate us" anymore.

I tend to agree with Friedman.  Really, who the fuck cares why the various terrorists hate the western world anymore?  There is nothing we can do to make these people who bring terror upon the planet to stop the activities by the sleeper cells of their religious death cult on any continent.

The only brake upon Islamic-based terrorists' lunacy will come only when the leaders of Islam start discreditting the actions of these mass murderers.  The U.S. military can efficiently capture, kill, or detain one terrorist, but then, two more killers spring up from where the initial one came.  That is not a solution.

Friedman made a salient point.  I'm just going to paraphrase it and put it into my own words.  A generation ago, novelist Salman Rushdie authored a book called "The Satanic Verses," which didn't characterize the Islamic prophet in a way that the Iranian mullahs would have preferred.  Back in 1989, Ayatollah Khomeini issued an official fatwa calling for the death of Salman Rushdie for his blasphemy.  I read that book -- I found it to be tedious and boring -- but not so bad as to demand the author be killed for it.

But, Rushdie just wrote a book.  To date, except for some minor league Islamic cleric in Spain, no major league Islamic cleric has issued a fatwa condemning the actions of Osama bin Laden, or al Qaeda for their terrorist acts and the deaths of thousands of people.  Until the leaders of Islam actively take back their own religion, blood will continue to be spilled all over the planet, in my humble opinion.  Suicide bombers don't go to heaven, they are instantly incinerated into a fiery hell of their own making. Duh.

Well, anyway, tomorrow afternoon, I plan to wander aimlessly out into a field where I might catch a glimpse of the Space Shuttle blasting off into space again.  That might give me some hope for the future of mankind.

Oh, and on Friday, I certainly will be checking out Sci-Fi channel's new season of Battlestar Galactica, StarGate, and Atlantis.  I watched a behind-the-scenes show on Monday.  There are a few characters coming onto SG1 that were big on other SF shows.  Mitch Pileggi, Fox Mulder's boss at the FBI on the X-Files is one actor.  Two more actors on Sci-Fi Friday are from the popular show, Farscape.  It really looks very cool.


[Headphones] :: Hurricane Jeanne is Gone - JfZ

According to the Miriam-Webster online dictionary web site, the word "blog" was the number one most looked-up word in 2004.  I feel this might have marked a crucial point in the evolution of cyberspace.  Suddenly, the tipping point happened.  Previously residing safely in the domain of techno-savvy geeks of all stripes and ages, blogs suddenly fell over the cliff of obscurity and into the domain of popular culture with a thud, last year.  Politicians even followed the traditional news media which had been struggling to come to terms with the power of online publishing.

Not Good

Howard Dean raised millions of dollars from thousands of small donations in the primary election season using his online presense which was made hip and current by his campaign's frequently updated blog.  After Dean, the Bush and Kerry campaigns followed his lead, and reached thousands of volunteers, and raised millions of dollars by leveraging this emerging idea in the new digital media.

Now only a year later, blog authors and group blog owner/editors are now frequently used as informed guests on any number of cable news shows.  They talk about blogs and with blog authors on C-Span, CNN, Fox, and MSNBC.  Now, MSNBC even has its twice daily magazine news show called "Connected: Coast to Coast" with hosts Ron Reagan and Monica Crowley airing at 12 and 5 pm.

Not Bad

Almost a year ago, during the Republican National Convention in New York City, I actually felt very connected, even though I could not leave my house.  I was following the unreported gossip via an IRC chat room at [plastic.com] with dozens of other fellow phreeks, some literally transcribing their experiences at convention after-parties on laptops and blackberries via wireless.

I thought it was great fun.  Although I could flip through my cable TV channels and watch live coverage of the convention, many people in other countries could not.  Like BlogDrive, Plastic also has users from every time zone on the planet.  People had to rely on reports and impressions from people on the ground in NYC.  And then, there were also people watching each cable network for pundit spin and propaganda.  The digirati were scooping the stories before the corporate media could make sense of any of them.  Unlike blogs, corporate media only dedicated cupcake reporting about the days of massive protest or the 500,000 protestors in NYC during the Republican National Convention -- or even worse, as Fox so commonly does with news, they simply minimalized its importance by making fun of it.

And, before I continue into my next point, I remember watching Ron Reagan last year and being surprisingly impressed that he had a very quick mind.  He would ask some very astute and pointed questions from his guests in his role as only a stand-in host.  I had a sneaking suspicion that the good impression he made during the convention wasn't just my own and commented that we would see him again on TV.  Now, we do.

So anyway, next and back.  Blogs are no doubt here to stay for a while.  While I have a number of philosophical topics after which I could continue this entry, I just wanted to touch on the recent history of the blog and then give you some web surfing homework.

So Ugly

Half of the people in North America already know this tragic new story, but just last week, little 8-year-old Shasta Groene was rescued from her apparent kidnapper around 2:00 am at a Denny's restaurant in Idaho.  She and her brother, Dylan, had been missing for about six weeks, since local police discovered the rest of her family brutally murdered at their home.  Three people were found in that blood splattered home.

Everyone searched for the two youngest members of the household to no avail.  Nothing.  Then, suddenly after weeks, but only miles away from the original crime scene, the little girl is identified by a waitress and is then miraculously rescued.  It is now feared from the little girl's statements, and likely to be confirmed, that her brother is dead.

The man with whom little Shasta was found is a convicted pedophile, Joseph Duncan.  Police and FBI are investigating everything.  The most very odd thing to me about all of this is that you, too, can obtain some insight into the mind of this monster.  The alleged spree murderer, kidnapper, and child sexual predator, Joe, maintained a blog called Fifth Nail.

His last blog entry dates correspond with the dates of the beginning of the horrific crime.  Tell me what you think.  Do you think this is clearly the private revelations and ponderings of someone who was delusional or psychotic?  Was he a schizophrenic time bomb?  There are phrases in his entries that makes me think that he could be schizophrenic and delusional, but you tell me.  And just a warning: his last entry, "Still Confused," has more than one thousand comments, so read it at your own risk.

Viewed through the disturbing hindsight of his alleged crimes, reading this man's blog might make your skin crawl.  Is it a typical blog in which people reveal things in couched language or does the cynic in you think he was sane and lucid enough to fake all of it as an affirmative defense, such as to document insanity, against his sick premeditated criminal acts?  Again, you decide.


[Headphones] :: Crazy - Gruntruck

I was awake the other night in my normal vampiric fashion when that magic time of television came to pass that I call the Dead Zone.  I happen to be awake because my cat kept waking me up with her annoying "I'm in heat" disgruntled yowling.  Depending on the channel, the Dead Zone usually occurs around three or four o'clock in the morning.  Despite hours of re-runs available to them, many stations simply broadcast those infomercials for various stuff.  Informercial hour (or hours) must happen for a reason, but I just don't know what it could be.

I'm not asking you to admit that you've watched the Dead Zone hour of infotainment because you were on some sort of deleterious and prolonged crack or meth binge -- your reasons for being awake at that unholy hour are your own -- but sometimes I do wonder if some of you have ever even seen these infomercial shows.  And, if you have, do you have any favorite infomercials?

At three or four in morning, there are the usual suspects lurking (loitering) or participating over on the main blogdrive tagboard.  Some of the most hilarious and memorable tagboard chat sessions have happened during the TV Dead Zone.  I can't even imagine living in the United Kingdom, waking up in the morning and while drinking coffee (or likely tea), reading the drunken nonsense taking place on the tagboard at that hour.  Poor Andy.

Recently, the informercials I would have normally flipped past with my remote control have caused me to pause and actually watch them.  Several have invoked memories of past chapters in my life and compelled my attention.  Discounting conspiracy theories of subliminal message persuasion, perhaps one is simply vulnerable to certain things during this hour of marketing to fellow insomniacs.

One unlikely infomercial that grabbed my attention recently is hosted by Kevin Trudeau.  Besides Ron Popeil, Kevin Trudeau is one of the old school daddies of the infomercial.  I happen to have met him on a free Carnival Cruise to the Bahamas one year.  Kevin first made himself into a multi-millionaire by developing and marketing his "Mega Memory" system.  "Mega Memory" is a great educational tool.  It works.  I tried it years ago, and actually still use some of the mnemonic methods in it to this day. I also do remember that my friend, Dances with Stumps, still has my copy of it.  Give it back, dude.

The other informercial that brought back a flood of memories for me was for the Time Life "Legends" rock CD collection.  It is hosted by some Dead Zone hottie whose name escapes me and Roger Daltrey, the lead singer of The Who.  While half of the songs previewed in the seven CD set were before my time, I still remember hearing most of them on the radio.

So, imagine this ridiculous scenario: It's three in the morning and I'm turning up the volume on my TV in order to sing along with half of these friggin' songs.  As my close friends could tell you, I don't sing and I don't dance in public.  But, once in a while in rare spells of ungrumpiness, I'll feel absolutely compelled to sing along to music in private. I'm not one to sing in the shower, but I will occasionally sing along with the radio in the car.

More astonishing to me is the Dead Zone epiphany that I somehow must still have some working neurons somewhere in my brain that have obviously stored the lyrics to these obscure hits of classic rock.  It really made wonder why this trivial knowledge had not been deleted from the wet file storage between my ears.  Even more troubling -- not only do I know the words to sing, but also I'm having flashbacks of teenage proportions remembering girlfriends and insane high school parties that would certainly scare Wayne and Garth.

Jump-starting memories of my own Spicoli high school daze was compelling enough for me to put that product of that particular informercial on my 'someday' list of cash expenditures.  I wrote down the toll free phone number and noted their URL for future reference.  While I think twenty bucks is a bit steep for a CD of old songs, it did bring back all those memories of care-free teenage exhuberance and insanity.  It booted up and defragged some fond memories of wonderful girlfriends.

The memory for every woman for whom I've ever had any true affection can be recalled in my memory by some song that marked that time and place.  Apparently, everyone has some song associated with a past relationship.  I thought perhaps one day I would burn a CD of "our songs." But, before I reveal my own list of Ball Busters on Parade and the songs that nonetheless remind me most pleasantly of those women, I would rather solicit your list from you, first.  You can comment anonymously, after all.

If I get some thoughtful and participatory comments on this topic, I will give you my list in the comments, also.  You show me yours, and I'll show you mine.  And ladies, you're invited to make a song list, too.

[Headphones] :: Jessica: Pleasure Club Mix - JfZ